Where It All Started: A Van, a High Street, and a Lot of Stubbornness

I found these photos the other day and it took me right back. That's our first van. A Citroen Nemo, parked up on Rochester High Street in Kent, probably around 2012. We'd have been doing an install or a service call nearby. Back then, that van was the business. If it broke down, we didn't work.

The Very Beginning

When I started Bowden Digitec, it was just me. No office, no team, no fancy website. I had a phone, a van, and enough experience in the print industry to know that most companies were doing it wrong. Overcharging, locking people into contracts they didn't understand, sending engineers who'd never seen the machine before. I knew I could do better than that. Not because I was special, but because the bar was that low.

The van tells the story, really. Look at the back: Repair, Sales, Service, Photocopiers, Printers, Software, Multi Functional Devices. We listed everything because we did everything. Had to. When you're a one-man operation, you're the salesman, the engineer, the accountant, and the bloke who cleans the van on Sundays.

Rochester High Street

Rochester was our patch in those early days. Medway, the surrounding towns, bits of Kent. I'd drive around doing installs and service calls, building up a customer base one machine at a time. Most of our early clients came through word of mouth. You fix someone's copier properly, don't overcharge them, and turn up when you say you will. They tell their mates. That's still how we get most of our work, to be fair.

The high street's changed a bit since then. The van's definitely changed. But the way we work hasn't. We still answer the phone ourselves. We still turn up when we say we will. We still don't put traps in the contract.

A Proper Family Business

A few years back I took my daughter out on the rounds with me. Got her kitted out in a Bowden polo and everything. She wasn't entirely thrilled about spending a day visiting offices and looking at photocopiers, but she came along and made the best of it. That's what being a family business means to us. It's not just a line on the website. The kids have grown up around it. They've seen the vans, met the customers, heard the phone ring at teatime. It's part of the fabric.

What's Different Now

Quite a lot, if I'm honest. We've got a team of manufacturer-trained engineers now. We're ISO 9001 and 14001 certified. We're FCA regulated as a credit broker. We supply Epson, Sharp and Develop across the whole of the UK, not just Medway. We acquired Wade Business Solutions in Thanet last year. We've got our head office at Manston Business Park and engineers based across London and the South East.

We look after academy trusts with 20+ machines, construction groups with regional offices, estate agent chains across the South East. The scale is completely different from that photo on Rochester High Street.

But the principle is exactly the same. Turn up, do a good job, charge fairly, and answer the phone when it rings. That's it. That's the whole business model. Always has been.

Why I'm Sharing This

Partly because it's nice to look back. Partly because I think it matters. When you're choosing a print company, you can go with a big faceless dealer who'll assign you an account number and a regional rep who changes every six months. Or you can work with people who started with one van and built something proper.

We're not the biggest. We're probably not the cheapest on every quote. But we've been doing this for over a decade, we've never lost a client to bad service, and every single customer can ring me directly if something isn't right. Try getting that from a PLC.

If you're looking for a print partner and you want to deal with real people, give us a ring on 0800 009 6770. We've come a long way from that Nemo on Rochester High Street, but we haven't forgotten where we started.